Introduction

This documentation covers technical issues affecting your pages on Google Search.
For instance, how to implement structured data that can affect the appearance of your page
on Search, or technical details on how to get your AMP pages to appear in Google Search with
features that are specific to Google Search.

These documents focus on the technical "how". For documentation about "why" you might want
to implement various features, or a broader view of how Google Search works, please
visit the Search Console help center, which
provides guides, overviews, and more general information for site owners, SEOs, and content providers.

Learn how to get the most out of AMP in Google Search. Implement AMP-specific search features
to enable carousels; manage your AMP pages in the Google AMP cache; enable Google Analytics
for your AMP pages.

An organized search experience

As users' devices and context evolve beyond the desktop into the world of mobile devices and
everyday tasks, Google Search is also evolving by providing rich search results that
support users beyond the desktop: from making a reservation, to calling your business’s customer
service number, to selecting the perfect chocolate cake recipe while at the grocery store.
Through the Google App, we deliver information to users even before they query, helping them to re-
engage with your content in moments that matter.

Google Search also delivers structured search experiences that respond to different user search
intents—or types of queries. These responses range from lists of results for list-seeking
queries to clustered facts for specific entity queries. For example, a list query
for “chicken recipes” provides results that facilitate scanning and refinement, whereas an entity
query for a movie like “Interstellar” can result in content grouped around that entity to encourage
deeper exploration, such as showing critic review snippets from various sites.

The latest visual interface for all these experiences is a rich result, which
is a layout for a single item or a list of items that that can deliver enhanced
search results in a way that renders well across multiple devices and screen
sizes.

How does search present rich results?

The Search process begins when Google systems crawl the web from link to link.
Site owners control access to their content, which includes text and images,
and Google sorts all the information in the Index and serves it up to users,
using algorithms to improve the experience with features like autocomplete and
contextual based signals.

In order to optimize your content appearance in the evolving Search
experiences, it helps to understand your relationship with three key
touchpoints in the Search flow.

1. Your metadata

Metadata is data that describes other data. This means details about the services
and types of content you offer to Search users. Google obtains metadata from you in one or both
of the following ways: directly from the markup you provide in your content, or by establishing
you as an entity authority. Google uses content metadata and relevant authority data to
power features in rich results and in Knowledge Graph cards.

Content markup: As a content provider, you manage or own online content that you want Search
to display in one of its rich formats, such as recipes, articles, or videos.
For this purpose, you provide structured data markup for that content based on
specific aspects such as ratings, images, and play actions.

2. Getting into the index

Getting into the Search index begins when our systems find and access your
content. This can occur without any extra effort on your part. Our crawlers
follow natural links to your content and discover your pages, ingesting their
metadata, and later correlate information from other sources, such as authority
details.

This crawling process occurs according to schedules controlled by algorithms
that determine content demand based on a variety of factors.

You can help our crawler discover your pages by providing a sitemap, which is
basically a list of URLs to your content. You can prioritize discovery by
providing URLs that are important for us to discover, such as pages to which
you’ve added markup for specific features.

3. Your user’s search intent drives presentation

When you prepare your content for inclusion in Search, it can appear in a variety of visual
forms, because it’s the user’s search intent that determines how Google Search displays
information. A user’s search intent is a concept describing how our algorithms
understand what the user really wants with a specific query within a specific context.

For example, if a user queries for “turkey,” the search intent is ambiguous, so
our results will display a mix of items, including a Knowledge Graph card about the
country of Turkey, news items on Turkey, and turkey as a kind of fowl.

However, if the query changes to “turkey recipes,” the search intent narrows to
a list query, so a carousel of recipes helps to cluster related recipes
together, including a summary carousel for recipes from various providers and a
host carousel for recipes from a specific host.

As a content provider of recipes, you can mark up your content to make
it eligible for single or multi-item rich results for these kinds of search intents.

What’s Next

To make your content eligible for inclusion in rich search results, follow
these steps:

Register

Register your site with Search Console
to help optimize your site's performance in Search, and gain a better understanding of how our
systems crawl, index, and serve your content. In addition, you’ll get access to enhanced
reporting tools to make sure your content meets our guidelines and your markup is error free.

Brick and mortar business owners can register their business with Google via Google My Business. This can help you get your
business location, content info and hours into both Maps and Search.